The compact size and high efficiency of semiconductor laser diodes make them the ideal candidates for applications requiring concentrated and spectrally pure laser light sources. Applications such as optical storage, low end printing and telecommunications that once used many different types of laser sources, now only use semiconductor laser diode sources once these diode laser sources with the required characteristics were successfully developed. The primary reason that semiconductor laser diodes have these very useful characteristics is that the excited or pumped laser area can be made very small through the use of semiconductor fabrication techniques such as photolithography and epitaxial layer growth. Due to the small lasing area, the gain and optical intensity, which are the two main ingredients necessary for efficient conversion of excited atoms in the lasing medium to lasing photons, the efficiency of a laser diode can be very high. This effect produces a laser source of high brightness: that is, a source of a certain power with relatively low beam divergence for its wavelength. Brightness can either be defined in terms of its Lagrange invariant, the area of the emitting light source times the solid angle of the divergence of the light from the source, or in the case of Gaussian beams, the M2 parameter.
Nevertheless, this primary advantage of semiconductor laser diodes—small lasing volumes—becomes a disadvantage when scaling these devices to higher powers, however. Single TEMoo mode operation near the diffraction limit requires lasing modal dimensions (laser diode stripe width) to be typically less than 3-5 microns. As the power extracted from these lasing dimensions is increased, optical facet damage and other power related damage mechanisms usually limit the available power from these devices to be less than 500 mW. As the laser diode stripe width is increased to about 100 microns, powers in excess of ten (10) Watts can be achieved but at much reduced beam quality. Such output from one laser diode stripe is significantly inadequate for many applications in terms of both power level and beam quality. For example, applications in the of high-power processing of materials such as welding and the cutting and heat treating of materials such as metals, require power levels in the range of 1 kW to 5 kW with beam qualities equivalent to the output of a 200-400 microns by 0.14-0.22 numerical aperture (NA) optical fiber.
The need to scale the output of these semiconductor laser diodes to higher powers while maintaining beam quality has led to several approaches. The first is the well understood and documented approach to use these laser diodes to pump a solid state gain material such as NdYAG. In this approach, what would be the lower brightness of an array of incoherent semiconductor laser diodes is converted to the near M2 of 1.0 TEMoo output of the laser diode pumped solid state laser. Another approach is to fiber couple the output of many individual laser diodes or laser diode bars to cladding pump a rare earth doped fiber laser. Near diffraction limited M2 values of <1.1 have been achieved with power levels greater than 800 W in a Yb doped double clad fiber laser.
Many applications such as material processing and solid state laser pumping require beam qualities much less than diffraction-limited, and much attention has been given to the use of beam shaping and steering techniques to improving the quality of the stacked laser diode array bars themselves. Most of these efforts have focused on beam shaping and steering techniques that treat the laser bar emitter as a single wide source (greater than 19% fill factor) of 5 to 10 mm in width. Devices using these techniques have been widely published, and devices producing approximately 600 Watts in a 600 μm 0.22 NA fiber are commercially available. Earlier techniques which utilize individual 100 μm-wide laser emitters have been published, which use either individual laser diode emitters aligned with the devices oriented perpendicular to the epitaxially grown diode junction along an arc, or individual laser diode emitters aligned in a single bar (less than 21% fill factor) that are individually collimated and passed through a 90° image rotating prism such that their fast axis directions become co-linear. While this technique produced diode focusing and fiber coupling with good quality, this technique was confined to single laser diode bars, and the resultant output levels fall far short of what is required for high-power processing applications. Also, it has been through the development of high power broad area emitters for the telecommunications industry, that high power bars with less than 21% fill factors have recently become available with sufficient lifetimes for them to be practical for industrial applications.